There are countless cheap domain and hosting providers out there. One just needs to take a read through the reviews and forums to see that many are not worth doing business with, especially the cheaper ones. It really can be a dangerous industry to go near – many promises are made, and almost as many are broken. If I had a dollar for every time I’d been let down by a web host, I’d be able to afford much better hosting.

Thankfully, I’ve found a few reliable hosting providers and domain registrars I am willing to recommend to you. All of these companies are great because they:

Are Cheap

Are Reliable

Probably won’t rip you off

Here are the providers I recommend for Cheap Domain Registration and Web Hosting:

I prefer to register my domains with VentraIP. While they have had a habit of moving wholesale providers in the past, they are now accredited with ICANN and auDA meaning they don’t have any middle-men to deal with and should be able to provide a pretty stable registration experience from here on in.

Not only are they one of the cheapest providers out there, they are also one of the few major providers around to throw in free DNS hosting and email forwarding. Most other domain registrars I’ve come across sell this as an extra service.

Zuver are my go-to company for cheap web hosting. Most of the smaller clients I do work for now days are hosted with Zuver. They are owned by VentraIP and share a lot of staff/infrastructure (at least for now), but offer cheaper Australian shared web hosting. They are a cheap and cheerful Australian web-hosting provider.

Their cheapest plan is $2/month and their most expensive is $4/month. Plus they don’t try to endlessly upsell you, unlike pretty much everyone else on the market.

They also offer cheap domains. Same deal as VentraIP with free DNS hosting.

I’ve had an on-again and off-again relationship with Dreamhost. While I don’t have any of my own services with them at the moment, I have had a good run with them in the past. I moved away because the ping times to Australia aren’t great, and I am transitioning to unmanaged VPS hosting anyway. But as far as USA Shared Web Hosts go, they are great.

My favourite bit is their custom control panel. I’ve never been a fan of cPanel, and Dreamhost’s panel is everything that cPanel isn’t. It’s super pleasant to use.

Also, check out their object storage. It’s fairly new, but has pricing that completely annihilates the competition.

Digital Ocean are the new kids on the block, and they are making a big splash in the hosting industry. They don’t offer shared hosting like all of these other companies do – they offer Virtual Private Servers (VPS). But not any cheap VPS – all of their services are on SSD drives, making them super fast.

Many websites could be happily hosted from their $5/month plan. In fact, I plan to move my sites over to Digital Ocean within the coming months. I’ve done a lot of testing so far, and I’m very happy.

Disclosure: This post contains affiliate links. That being said, I’d still recommend these guys without getting anything in return. They are good.

Get the Broadcast Technology Newsletter

Sign up for the email newsletter about media and technology. Sent irregularly. No spam.

I'm Anthony Eden, and I'm a broadcast technician / software developer / technology solutions engineer. I've been working in broadcast media since 2008 (getting my start in Community Radio while still at school), and developing software and websites for just as long.
Right now, I work in the broadcast industry and provide some freelance services through Media Realm.